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Week #4B - Aesthetics & Design

https://www.youtube.com/
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/

Both of these sites have one major factor in common that makes them effective and routine visits for me - what I want to see, the reasons why I go to the site - are immediate and placed right in front of me upon loading in. In the case of YouTube, the algorithm and my subscriptions keep a feed of new content coming whenever I load up the page, and that's a great way to keep me visiting. MTGGoldfish also has news articles, deck ideas, and new card previews constantly cycled up on the splash page, and everything I want to learn and know is within a few clicks of navigation.

Both sites work very well with simple designs and straightforward inter-site linking. If you want to find a specific video or article, you can navigate to it within a few menus with ease, and don't have trouble or get lost trying to find just the thing you were looking for. The search bars also help immensely with that - letting you just punch in a few keywords and going from there. In the case of MTGGoldfish, the site really lets me see everything I need at a glance when on a page - all the relevant data is available about whatever it is I'm looking at - be that deck size, card prices, or exactly what's in it. Aesthetically, both use white and a single color as the major theme - white and red and white and orange, respectively, which is non-intrusive and easy to look at for long periods of time. Black text on a white background is the most common way to convey text, and keeping to that makes consuming large amounts of information much more tolerable.

I come back and back again to these sites because they're a reliable, easy to access and use source of information and entertainment for me. Were the sites more difficult to navigate - or more straining to look at - I'd almost certainly try and find the same sort of thing elsewhere. However, both of these sites have kept me using them for years, thanks to their smart design and good looks.



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